CRT SCR$ Project - a photo collection preserving the "CRT look"

General Off-Topic
#1

Hi, posting this here because I know there are many CRT enthusiasts among the Libretro crowd, and I think it might be of interest to shader developers.

CRT SCR$ Project, hosted at archive.org, is a preservation drive aiming to build a collection of high-resolution (and hopefully quality) photographs showcasing software from the SD era displayed on CRT TVs and monitors. It’s something I’ve been working on for years, and I have just released a major update (v0.3) featuring tons of new material.

CRT SCR$ Project - The Book Edition is a newly released photo book based on this collection. The content on archive.org is and always will be free, but it also takes a lot of funds and time to develop. So, instead of starting a Patreon or something similar, I thought it’d be nice to have a tangible reward for those who’d like to support this project. The book costs 10 USD (~9 EUR) and is available for purchase at www.crtartbooks.com

The book also serves as an easily accessible general overview of the CRT era, showcasing photos of live CRT displays connected to original computers and consoles. It includes:

-more than 460 pages featuring hundreds of high-resolution photos of live CRT screens (with or without TV bezels, close-ups, darkroom shots, and miscellaneous photos)

-10 CRT TVs and monitors

-over 25 consoles and microcomputers

-hundreds of games ranging from well known hits to obscure underdogs

-comparison sections showcasing differences between different inputs and CRT tech (e.g. RF vs composite vs S-Video vs RGB, or slot mask vs aperture grille)

-PDF bookmarks for every page & tags for easy searching

The images have been slightly more compressed than the original JPEGs in the collection, but most are still highly zoomable, with many allowing zooming in to the phosphor level.

Here are some example spreads from the book, (you can see some other ones on the shop page).

I’m always on the lookout for photo contributors. Due to my limited hardware resources and budget, I managed to cover only some of the most popular retro hardware so far (the current platform/CRT list is available on the archive’s page). So, if you have a CRT TV or monitor connected to an original console, microcomputer or some other accurate source like MiSTer, and are willing to take some photos, please get in touch!

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#2

These things are necessary. Good job, successes!

Almost 15 Gb O_o how many photos do you have?
How do you do the white balance?

One detail, Tandy is not composite.

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#3

Interesting close-ups, one could try to mimic the look on a shader using these shits. That pvm ones are relatively easy in particular.

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#4

Thank you. There are about ~2500 photos, though not all are high quality ones - I included also a lot of pics from the web in separate directories. Still, I guess 80-90% are hi res photos taken by me and some contributors.

White balance…heh, yeah, it’s a major PITA. At the moment I kinda gave up and just shoot everything at ~6300K and try to correct in Lightroom as I go while eyeballing the CRT (I shoot tethered so it’s all “live”). Otherwise it just seems impossible to get it 100% right, due to a multitude of factors. But I’m open to any new solutions if somebody has experience of doing it and getting good results.

Funnily enough, it’s mostly a problem on my Trinitron consumer sets, for some reason - TVs with shadowmask seem to have higher percentage of showing proper colours in a photo.

The Tandy in the PC section is a Tandy VM-22 monitor, (connected to Tandy 1000HX) which I’m pretty sure is composite - do you mean this one?

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#5

A useful extension to your project would be to capture images of vector CRT displays. There are still plenty of raster CRTs about. Vector CRTs were always far fewer and as they die, there’ll be even fewer to use for reference images. The set of people with the skills to write vector display emulators and access to vector CRTs is very small, far smaller than that for Raster CRTs. Good reference photos of vector CRTs is therefore even more important.

The photos of vector CRTs on the web are generally terrible. Black screens with a few bright lines, let alone things like Asteroids bullets, are a torture test for camera automatic modes which simply aren’t designed for photographing vector CRTs at all. Lines end up massively overexposed which washes out all the detail that emulator writers need.

It really needs people with a good understanding of photography, a fully manual capable camera and access to vector arcade machines to capture images/video. Ideally they’d have an idea of the sort of details emulator writers need too so they can capture the important details.

Some thoughts on photographing vector CRTs:

  • Match shutter speed to frame rate.
  • Control image brightness with aperture. The aperture mode claimed by mobile phones really just simulates depth of field in post processing. We are interested in aperture for ‘controlling the amount of light that hits the sensor in a given time’ not depth of field.
  • Video would be useful. Capturing how lines/dots fade over time is useful for emulator writers.
  • Lack of aperture control might be overcome by:
    • Placing a white border around a screen (e.g. with sheets of white card).
    • Setting automatic exposure to full frame.
    • Photograph the screen and enough of the white border so the screen in the photograph looks like it does with your eyes. Repeat with more/less border until it does.
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